Customer Reviews

Titans: The Heroic Visions of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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I didn't buy this book for the big names of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. I bought this book because of the art of the comic book characters. I have been extremely pleased with my purchase.

This book is a collection of some of the most breathtaking art images of comic book characters. Most of the pictures are of Vallejo and Bell's work on Marvel and DC's masterpiece trading card collections. There are also some miscellaneous art pieces added, but these are also of the comic character nature. Since the pictures are much larger, you can appreciate the detail much better than anything you'd see on a little trading card.

The book is bound well, with thick high gloss pages. Most of the pictures are accompanied with a brief description by Vallejo or Bell. The book is also split into chapters to try and give a logical order to the collection.

Titans is a must for any comic book enthusiast as the art brings much more life to the characters. I would imagine that this would be a good book for any Vallejo or Bell fan as well. However, I have not seen much of their work outside of comic paintings. So, I cannot speak much on the comparative aspects here.

Titans mainly covers the art Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell produced for the Marvel Masterworks trasing card series in the mid-80's, with a few covers and misc. art thrown in for good measure. While it's nice to see the art at a larger size, the limited variety of poses gets old after a while. Boris and Julie use each other as models, so most of the faces look alike; The ones that don't look like them are based on bodybuilders, so the female characters have a very hard look to them, facially speaking. The colors are gorgeous, though. The real problem with the book is the text, by Nigel Suckling, who manages to live up to the first syllable of his last name. The book is riddled with spelling errors (Ogum, instead of Ogun), characters have the wrong names attatched to their paintings (Mariko and Yukio's names are transposed, as well as Yukio being called by the wrong name). The text passages show that Suckling didn't bother to get more than a passing familiarity with the comic characters; He describes Spider-Man as being bumbling...? His passages about Boris & Julie's views on time-travel & Geography are hilariously bad.

Titans is a nice book for fans of Boris & Julie; I would have liked more information on their techniques, and their opinions of the pieces, though. Anything to save me from Suckling's turgid prose....

Titans provides original paintings of superheroes from Marvel Comics, gathering the complete collection of these artists' paintings under one cover. Fans of either the artists or Marvel Comic scenes will consider this indispensable for a fantasy collection; packed with full-color and full-page fantasy images in all their drama. Highly recommended: a fine gift choice.

Boris and Julie have sucessfully give the superheros a different touch, unlike what we see in the Mavel style. A great book with very expressive in the style as it was drawn. A huge break through from the usual Boris's and Julie's kind of work. A must collect for X-man collectors.